


The Wretched (Burn Together)

by ScreamingViking



Series: The Wretched [2]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Compilation of FFVII - Freeform, Enemies to Enemies, Gen, Human Experimentation, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-04-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:07:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23393749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScreamingViking/pseuds/ScreamingViking
Summary: Tifa travels back in time to the night Nibelheim burned to save Sephiroth from himself.Unfortunately, Sephiroth has no interest in being saved.
Relationships: Tifa Lockhart/Sephiroth
Series: The Wretched [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1582594
Comments: 36
Kudos: 77





	1. Chapter 1

Of course it wasn’t that easy. Tifa hadn’t really believed it would be.

Time travel itself was difficult, the mechanisms behind it fiendishly complex, and the price of turning back time higher than she could ever articulate.

But the plan itself was so very simple. She stepped out of a burning dead end future and into a misty Nibelheim morning twenty years in the past. She pushed past a painfully young Zack and Cloud, descended the stairs of the Shinra mansion into the basement, reached out to a monster who wasn’t one yet, and offered him a chance to turn back. 

“It doesn’t work.” Sephiroth said, his eyes clouded. “Jenova’s plans… the Promised Land.” 

“No. You failed.” He had come close, perilously close more than once, but in the end he achieved nothing more than dragging them all down with him. She stood proud as his only survivor, but that wasn’t enough. That wasn’t a victory. 

He furrowed his brow and lowered his head. His skin was pale and shiny with perspiration, and his eyes bloodshot after days of reading in the yellow light. He stood in the centre of the library and looked utterly alone. Once she might have felt pity for him, or maybe some kind of closure at the scene. She hadn’t felt much of anything in so long. 

He shook his head. “Why? What went wrong?”

“We stopped you.”

His gaze rose to hers. It wasn’t clouded anymore. “Did you?” His eyes narrowed.

And she realised her mistake. 

He launched forward, she rolled back and activated her Exit materia. The cold steel of a sword flashed just as darkness enveloped her, and she fell back onto grass under the late day sun. The edge of her jacket was sliced open and blood trickled down her waist. 

She rolled to her feet, pushing a hand against the injury, but keeping her eyes pinned to the Shinra Mansion. 

The ground trembled. She took a couple of steps backwards. A sharp whine split the air, and she turned and started to run. The mansion exploded. The heat wave rolled over her, stinging her skin. She kept going.

So much for Plan A. 

She hadn’t really believed it would work anyway. 

* * *

Nibelheim burned. She didn’t try to stop it, how could she? She couldn’t kill him, and if he found her he would kill her and it would all be for nothing. She stood in the woods on the mountain slope and watched the pillar of smoke rise, her hands balling into fists. Red light dyed the night sky. 

Hatred sat heavy in her stomach. It ached in her bones and lingered in her muscles, tightening her tendons and sharpening her senses. Decades old and so bone deep she couldn’t remember not hating him anymore. Somehow it seemed as though Nibelheim had always been burning.

She had given him a chance. More than he deserved, but she had offered it nonetheless. She wasn’t sure if she would have accepted such an easy solution if he had accepted it. Not after so long. She didn’t _want_ to fight him, but it felt right. He didn’t deserve to just walk away. 

The smoke billowed still but the waves of heat grew lesser. She walked back to the town. 

She kept a hand to her injury as she walked and mentally tallied what she had to do. She could face him on her own, but she had the advantage of hindsight. He knew about her now, so the element of surprise was wasted, but he didn’t know any details. 

She left the tree cover. The town was gone. 

She hadn’t seen it like this last time, she hadn’t been there to pick through the ruins afterwards. A kind of nostalgic regret hit her. Burned wood crumbled under her shoes. Her eyes and lungs stung from the smoke. She kept walking, undeterred. 

Her nightmares had featured burning houses and charred bodies for so long it had lost its sting. 

She climbed the mountain. The sun rose behind her, and its first rays lit upon a body at the foot of the reactor. 

A girl in a cowgirl costume. 

She stopped. It was the first thing in the past that had really shocked her. She had tallied the cost to herself before making the plunge: inconsequential. It needed to be done and there was nothing left for her to go back to, nothing not worth sacrificing. 

The girl in front of her was so young. Her eyes were still open, unseeing. 

She looked up at the reactor. She walked around the body. 

Sephiroth should have fallen into the Reactor’s reservoir by now. Hojo would be there in a day to pick over the survivors, she would get Zack and Cloud out and miles away from Nibelheim by then. She plunged into the dimly lit interior of the reactor. The two men lay bleeding and unconscious on the stairs, and above them Jenova hung in her smashed tank: a body without a head. There was no sign of Sephiroth. 

She checked on the two of them, and then stood and straightened her back. Tifa marched up the stairs to the specimen platform. Jenova didn’t watch her, she couldn’t. Still she felt observed and hated. She stretched out her hand and called on her fire materia. 

A fireball engulfed the body, the remaining Mako in the tank ignited and the glass base shattered from the heat. A scream that wasn’t on any audible frequency pierced the air, shaking the walls and reverberating through Tifa’s skull. She hoped wherever Sephiroth was, he could feel it. 

A gunshot rang out. 

She fell forwards. Her shoulder burned. She tried to turn over but a boot landed on her upper back and blinding pain shot through her. 

“Don’t move,” Tseng’s voice called from above.

Her thoughts raced. She jerked her other elbow and knocked his leg out from under him. Pain screamed down her side but she rolled and leapt up anyway. Of course the Turks would be first on the scene, she should have known better. Not everybody died in the fire, not even in her timeline, the other survivors- 

Tseng cracked her across the temple with the butt of his gun. 

* * *

“Who is she?”

Her eyes wouldn’t open. Words swam through a thick haze before her mind made sense of them. 

“One of the villagers. What do you want done with her?”

“Hn. She destroyed the specimen.” She knew that voice, she disliked it. Her head swam trying to place it. “Bring her with the other two.” 

It was Hojo’s voice.

Only for a split second did she exist in a place where she was surprised to hear the voice of a man who had been dead for over a decade. She was lifted up and put onto something soft. In parting from the cold steel pressed against her face she remembered that she had been lying on the floor of a reactor, the same as Cloud and Zack. Enough of her mind reasserted itself that she knew what that meant. When and where she was, and why. 

Sephiroth was alive. 

Her head swam as she was carted into blinding light. Hojo gave orders that slowly lost coherence in her mind. It didn’t matter. 

Sephiroth was alive. He would escape the lifestream in four years. Everything else fell into the haze of irrelevance, as the interiors of her mind focused solely inward to turn over the problem that mattered. 

She moved in and out of consciousness. The ceiling of the Shinra mansion’s basement drifted into focus until a lab tech moved too quickly and her eyes wandered again, unable to focus on anything. Great flurries of activity and loud noises would come and go. It went on so long she distantly realised it had to have been artificially induced. She’d fought Tseng and been shot before. This wasn’t right. 

Her throat was sore from screaming. Distantly she acknowledged that it must have been her who had been making all the noise. She didn’t want to think about it. It didn’t matter. This wasn’t what she was here for. 

“Early signs of successful conversion,” Hojo muttered, leaning over her and staring through his narrow glasses. 

“Conversion…” she slurred. She blinked. 

He wasn’t there anymore. He was on the other side of the room yelling at a lab tech. 

“No, simpleton, you can’t harvest cells from clones, they’re dead ends. It needs to be an asymptomatic carrier. A primary source.” 

She blinked and the lights had dimmed. The techs were all gone. Her arms stung with needle points and incisions she didn’t remember getting. She clenched her teeth. Her mouth felt disgusting.

She rolled her head enough to look sideways. Hojo was leaning back on a chair with his arms crossed, watching her with a disinterested frown. The green light of two Mako tanks cast him in a spectral light. She distantly knew that Cloud and Zack were in those tanks. 

“We must have more J cells,” he said, almost helplessly. “If you don’t convert properly, I’ll dig the ones I planted into you straight back out again.”

For the first time since the reactor she could make him out properly. It struck her in the ghastly lighting and odd angle, that he had the same profile as his son. He looked down wearing a pensive frown. 

“You can’t have a reunion with nothing to reunite,” he muttered. 

A wave of cold passed over her. The professor left, turning off the lights. She shivered, and then shook with full body convulsions. The haze that had insulated her mind was coming apart into useless shreds.

Dread filled her, heavy and choking. She understood what was happening to her. After so many years of avoiding any contamination, never so much as a bruise of geostigma, finally they had caught her. 

Indignation drowned out her dread. She had resisted this for _decades_. She had stood up to Sephiroth alone more times than anyone but Cloud could boast, and she had survived every single one of his games. Anger consumed the indignation. She refused to fall. 

Strapped to an operating table in the dark, she dreamed. 

Nibelheim was burning. It always was in her dreams. The flames spread throughout the world, this one and the one she had left behind. She didn't know which world had burned first, or if it even mattered. She walked through it, vainly searching and coughing on smoke. 

Finally, in the heart of the flames she saw him. 

Sephiroth stood, unmoved by the flames licking at him, staring back at her. That was odd. He was always walking away from the destruction in her dreams, utterly above the fallen bodies and content with horror in his wake. He watched her, unblinking. 

She looked down. The fire materia was in her hands. 

The flames ate at her, crawling up her legs. It was a sweet relief, it burned so very hot, it almost reached a sublime cold. She wanted to fall into it, to be wholly consumed. 

No. No, she didn’t. She looked up at Sephiroth again, defiant and furious. He watched coolly. 

The fire licked up her body for all her resistance, feeding on her, burning hotter and hotter. There was no more materia anymore, no spectators, no crumbling world, just her and the fire. It was infinite in strength but she was so angry she didn't care. Her body collapsed to ash but still she endured. She was formless, nothing but a burning ball of spirit energy, stripped bare by the heat. She stared back into the heart of the flames, unmoved. 

The dream collapsed. 

She opened her eyes on an operation table. A pair of eyes deep inside of her opened too. 


	2. Chapter 2

Tifa's head was no longer swimming.

She didn't know if they had taken her off the sedatives or if she had simply grown resistant to them. Either way the syrupy haze retreated and left her fully conscious in an endless parade of scalpels and needles.

She focused on planning to distract herself. This didn't matter. It couldn't matter, she still had a planet to save, she told herself during the worst of it. Gaia was at stake, she could suffer this just a little longer. She tried to make plans with Zack, but he made such a fuss trying to get out that they eventually kept him unconscious at all times. Cloud hadn't even woken from his initial injuries yet. She lay limp and put up no resistance in the hopes her captors would grow lazy.

They snapped her into SOLDIER grade bindings and ignored her.

She lay awake in her little tank, empty of anything but air, and tried to recall security codes and anything Yuffie had said about lockpicks. She didn't have any tools to work with, not even a stray hairpin. She waited for her muscles to get stronger and the SOLDIER grade bindings to become a necessity. They never did. Hojo's words, 'asymptomatic carrier' passed through her head like a taunt.

With her eyes screwed shut and her limbs clamped down she listened for the changing of guards. Footsteps thudded against the hard floor and a lab tech entered the room. She cracked an eye open. No, it was two techs, she'd only heard the one. She strained her head against the bindings to look at him. He had skipped breakfast and was impatient for his shift to be over.

How did she know that?

He left to get something and she felt him wander out of the lab, down the corridor and into a storage room. There he leaned against a wall and pulled out a muesli bar from his pocket.

She couldn't know that.

She narrowed her eyes at Hojo, who was happily muttering to himself over some of her marrow samples. Who else had he injected with Jenova cells on the sly? She couldn't feel him so presumably not himself yet. One of the guards upstairs, she could feel him growing bored guarding a door.

Was this how Cloud felt all the time?

Not a second after she thought it, she felt Cloud. Floating in a tank out of her line of sight, he was exhausted and convinced he was dreaming, slowly losing himself to Mako addiction. And Zack next to him: sedated, angry, and humiliated.

Beyond them, a similar point of anger stewed in Mako. Her brow furrowed. Was that Vincent? He should have been in his coffin already. She reached out, casting her awareness in a way she couldn't describe, following a shiny little thread to the other presence. She brushed against it.

 _'Welcome, Tifa._ '

She yelped. Sephiroth's mind seized upon her, but she retreated, slamming back into her own head.

The cold eyes inside of her watched on. It felt like they raised an eyebrow at her.

 _'Get out of my head,'_ she seethed. How could she have been so stupid? Of course it was him.

 _'You came to me,'_ he replied, pensive. ' _Bringing my Mother's gifts.'_

Hojo swung around to her, rolling a tray of instruments. She tried to throw Sephiroth out of her head. It felt like it worked, but that glowing thread was still there, a direct line between them. She tried to sever it, tear it out. Her head started to ache.

Hojo got to work.

She could feel Sephiroth testing the walls of her mind, poking and prodding, exploring the limitations of the connection. Hindsight was her only advantage, if he got into her mind then she would have no chance.

A whimper broke from her lips at the cold touch of a scalpel.

 _'You gave up a world for this,'_ Sephiroth's baritone whispered inside her.

She clenched her teeth. She wouldn't cry out again. _'Jenova gave up nothing for you, but gave your life for her.'_

He scoffed. For a moment the presence laying siege to her mind drew back and opened up, just a little, and she saw that there was no creature called Jenova, not anymore. Its consciousness had dissolved into him while he sank through the lifestream, as surely as she would, as the whole Planet would if she didn't stop him. Then there would only be Sephiroth.

' _She has given me everything.'_

' _Funny,_ ' she said, refusing to be cowed. _'Hojo said almost the exact same thing to me. They're so similar, don't you think?'_

Rage spiked down the line and she felt better for it. It was petty and she probably ought to have been above it. She thought of a body she had stumbled over in Nibelheim's ashes, wearing her father's old clothes and a face she had forgotten. She wasn't above anything anymore.

' _Your father is so proud of you,_ ' she said snidely.

He pulled viciously on the line. She choked. It wrapped around her mind and threatened to topple her, to dislodge her from herself.

"Re...union," she gasped, before clamping her jaw shut.

"Eh?" Hojo said, looking up from unbuckling her from the gurney.

No. No. She wouldn't fall, she refused to. He pulled harder. She stood strong. The strain grew. She could feel the line tightening around her, but refused to bow to it.

She grabbed the threads and pulled right back.

There was no give at all from the other end.

Zack and Cloud looked up at her from their tanks.

Neither had been awake a moment earlier. She felt them staring at her and understood. Hojo looked between her and them with a squint.

He had unlocked her arm already. It sat limp on the gurney, next to the tray of tools.

She picked up a scalpel and plunged it into his neck. He jerked back with a cry. Blood streamed down his shoulder and chest, streaking red on his white lab coat. He choked on blood, a hand scrabbling at the damage.

He lunged for the cupboard where the Cure materia was kept.

"Zack!" She pulled on the glowing mental threads as hard as she could.

Glass and Mako exploded and Zack landed on his feet, his arms cut and lacerated. His bright blue eyes stared around frantically, as surprised as anyone at his sudden escape. He saw Hojo and his eyes narrowed.

Hojo didn't make it to the cupboard.

There was something frantic and fraying in Zack's eyes when he looked back at her and Cloud. He dragged a bloody hand through his hair.

"Unlock me," Tifa said.

He nodded. "Right. Yeah. Of course."

She left him to get Cloud out of his tank and went to go wake up Vincent. The vertigo of standing up and walking around played with her mind as she re-lived pushing the coffin lid off and staring into groggy red eyes.

He didn't especially want to be woken, and without an immediate threat from Lucrezia's son he didn't want to go with her either. It took the attack of the guards and a stream of bullets destroying the coffin to get him moving.

He followed her, Zack, and a comatose Cloud up the stairs, through anyone who got in their way, and out into the blinding daylight.

The wind howled over the rooftops of the rebuilt Nibelheim.

Tifa stepped over the threshold, and the morning sun stung her eyes. Barely closed wounds running down her abdomen ached. Her old clothes hung limp off of her frame. Her hand shook. She was trapped in the past and it hurt so much. Everything hurt, but there was no going back. Even turning back time wouldn't take it back.

She leaned heavily against the stone wall, screwed her eyes up tight, and tried not to cry. There was only the way forward.

"But Sephiroth burned it down!" Zack was saying, holding Cloud up in a fireman's carry. "How long has it been?"

"Sephiroth?" Vincent repeated.

"It's been a year," she rasped. She had checked Hojo's calendar.

One year down. That left her three to get everything into position before Sephiroth escaped the Lifestream at the Northern crater.

"I'm Zack. And this is Cloud."

"...Vincent."

She sucked in a hiccupping breath, and pulled herself back together. She nodded at them and forced a smile.

"I'm Tifa."

Zack's own forced smile faltered . "I... I think I knew your daughter. Old family name?"

"Oh." She blinked. She'd had a cover, she'd planned it all out. No good now."Yes. She led you up the mountain."

He squeezed her shoulder lightly. "I'm so sorry. She was a good kid."

She nodded, stiff and unsure. Was she really so different from her younger self? Vincent looked at her with sympathy she didn't want.

"What do you intend to do now?" he asked. His voice was hoarse and rattling from his long silence.

Zack shook his head. "I don't know."

"The Turks will be after us as soon as they realise what's happened," she said. "We should go over the mountains, they'll search the roads first."

She looked up at the mountain's silhouette. It was early in the day, they could cross the saddle and be on the western side before nightfall. Or she could take them through the cave systems.

"That will not be enough to throw the Turks off your tail," Vincent said. "Nor do you have any supplies."

"We'll make do," Zack replied, nodding pointedly at the town.

Vincent shook his head and turned back into the Mansion. "You'll find better in here, and it will give your enemies less to work with."

Zack followed him back in. She had to swallow a scream but she forced herself back in after them.

They stitched up their wounds properly, ransacked all the stores, and then scrubbed the place clean to disguise their actions, all on Vincent's orders. He had snapped into Turk mode, in a way he simply hadn't last time. He didn't ask any more questions about them, neither did he make any move to include himself in the little group. Zack kept up a running commentary to Cloud as he worked, joking with splintering desperation.

It receded into background noise for Tifa and she settled into the motions of work. She had done this a million times before, preparing for a journey, a battle, an apocalypse. Vincent retreated closer and closer towards the basement stairs so she gave him a backpack and told him to go keep watch outside. Zack asked her what to do next.

She looked around, nodded to herself, and led them out to face the world.

* * *

They conquered the first rise of the mountain with a burst of energy and unwarranted optimism. Zack spoke about the strength of SOLDIERs with enthusiasm utterly at odds with the situation. The sun sank in the sky and a Shinra helicopter landed in the town below.

The reality of their situation caught up with them. Tifa's legs were collapsing out from under her. She could hear Vincent's haggard breaths, and Zack was slowly sinking lower and lower with Cloud on his shoulders.

"We should… make camp," Zack, gulping in air. "The Turks… won't find us... tonight."

"Just a little further," she replied. Damn Hojo, she could have scaled the whole mountain in a day before this. She gritted her teeth and forced them on.

The sky glowed a stunning red by the time they reached it: the yawning mouth of the cave system that ran through the spine of the mountain range.

They collapsed a hundred meters in and curled up with no fire. Her body ached and her mind did too. She stretched out over hard ground, propping her head up on her arm. It was so familiar it was almost comforting.

She woke to whispers.

Vincent's baritone rumbled through the fog of her slumber. It sounded like safety, but her brow furrowed. She clung to the havens of sleep, but why… how could she be hearing Vincent? Hadn't he died keeping Sephiroth from the time travel magic?

Oh.

Zack's stage whisper replied. Ghosts talking to ghosts.

She opened her eyes. The dim light of the cave systems hadn't changed, but it felt as though it had been some time. Vincent had taken the first watch with Zack volunteering for second.

They were behind her, all she could see was the craggy wall.

"Where are you gonna go?" Zack asked.

There was the characteristic pause of Vincent considering his answer. She could hear the zips on Zack's boot jingling as he bounced his leg.

"I do not know. I should find what became of Lucrecia."

"Not to kick you while you're down, but it's been a long time, man. I don't know if your girl would have waited."

"She's isn't... she's Sephiroth's mother."

"...huh. Not Jenova?" Zack asked, his voice grim. "Would have been nice to know that a year ago."

She held her breath in the heavy silence that followed. The strings around her mind stirred. She held them down.

"I will leave you when we reach Rocket town," Vincent said after some time. He sounded resolute. Her mind raced. She needed him. "Where will you go?"

"Cloud and I are going to Midgar. I've got a beauty waiting for me."

"It has been a year."

"Yeah, well, even if she didn't wait, I've gotta see her. Rude to just skip out on someone, you know?" Zack laughed and she thought he might have been ruffling Cloud's hair. "Where else am I gonna go, huh?"

She couldn't do it alone. There was a good chance it would come down to a fight and she wasn't enhanced. She couldn't compete with Sephiroth on a physical level, not in the slightest. Maybe she could convince Zack to leave Cloud with her, but the experiment didn't run its course. He might not reach the heights he once did.

She needed them both.

But there was no Sephiroth to chase. In moving so soon she had removed the apparent urgency. She didn't even have Barret to inspire them with the plight of the planet. She wasn't a leader, she didn't inspire people.

She could tell them the truth. She doubted it would serve as anything more than a distraction and a reason to doubt her. On its own would an invisible threat as seen by a time traveler they didn't trust be enough to commit? To give everything for the cause? If they came at Sephiroth with anything less they would lose.

No. Their reasons had to be their own.

She yawned and stretched her arms out.

"Morning! Sort of."

"We should start moving soon," Vincent said, holding out a hand to her.

She let him pull her up.

She didn't know Zack well, she had no idea what might inspire him. Maybe he would come if Aerith and Cloud did.

Vincent… was a simpler case.

It would be manipulative of her. It was for the good of the Planet.

* * *

They moved quickly through the caves. They kept their torches low in the dark and left as little a trail as possible. At any moment they expected the Turks to catch up to them. Tifa strained her ears for the tap tap tap of their expensive shoes on stone.

No one jumped out at them. Very few monsters did too, to her increasing unease.

"Maybe a mercenary cleared this area out recently?" Zack suggested.

She shook her head, mercenaries didn't come this way, nobody would pay for the work of the monster pelts. They passed nests that looked recently occupied. Water dripped from stalactites and bats rustled on the ceiling, hidden in the dark. A cold draught moved through the caves.

She thought she heard something, like something soft hitting stone. She turned back, swinging her torch around. Shadows danced and stretched away. The path back was empty. Unless whoever was on their tail had hidden behind the craggy walls.

They would have to be able to see in the dark to do that.

She shook her head at herself. She had been doing this too long to be jumping at shadows.

She swung back to the path ahead.

A pale face flashed in the light of her torch.

"Ah!" She leapt back.

"Re..un...ion…"

Vincent's gun rose and the Buster sword caught the light.

"Stop! Don't attack," she called.

The figure, a tall man wrapped in a thick black rain jacket stumbled towards her, then stopped and swayed backwards. His head rolled on his neck and his arms hung limp at his side.

"Must…become…" he rasped, "One."

His eyes looked like green but then Zack shone his torch on them too and they were just brown. His Hair was limp ratty blond, stuffed into the collar of the black coat.

She swallowed. She hadn't expected to see a clone so soon.

She looked between Zack and Vincent. Would they connect the dots? "He kind of looks like-"

"No, he doesn't," Zack cut her off. "Hey. Are you alright, pal?"

The man mumbled something.

"Where did you come from?" Vincent asked sternly.

He didn't reply. His eyes were unfocused, fully dilated but not flinching from the direct light of the torches. Maybe they were green. It was hard to tell.

She stepped away from him. "We should leave him."

"He might alert the Turks to our presence."

"I don't think he even knows we're here," Zack said. He swung his sword back to its place and picked Cloud up again. "We have to keep going. Good luck pal."

Grudgingly they went around the man, moving the light back to the pathway and leaving him in the dark.

She couldn't hear his footsteps. Maybe he just hadn't moved.

"...Sephiroth..." he murmured behind them.

A shiver went up her spine. Zack's footsteps faltered.

The presence at the walls of her mind said nothing.

"Come on," she said, plunging ahead.

They made camp once more and got as much sleep as they dared. They didn't see any more people muttering in black capes, but she heard soft footfalls from time to time. She hoped it was monsters.

Vincent was starting to question the wisdom of taking this route when light broke at the end of the tunnel. After the long walk in the dark it looked blinding, and the sound of rushing water deafening.

They stepped out into the dim light of a night about to end. A waterfall cascaded down from the mountaintops high above, pooling in an icy cold lagoon. The water shimmered in the light of the crescent moon.

Zack collapsed at the side of the water, sighing in relief. He lay Cloud down on the spiky grass and sprawled next to him with his hands behind his head.

Vincent stood on the water's edge and stared moodily up at the moon.

She looked to the hidden entrance to the chamber behind the waterfall. She wasn't very good at this.

"Hey, what's that?" she said and plunged in.

Vincent and Zack grudgingly followed.

Lucrecia stood preserved within her Mako crystal, tragic and immortal. She asked after her son.

Tifa hung back and let Vincent face her. It felt like an ethereal dream in the half light, haunted by the glow of the jagged Mako crystals, and a warped version of a conversation Tifa had watched play out years ago.

"Where is my son, Vincent?" the woman asked, her voice echoing endlessly through the stone chamber. "What happened to Sephiroth?"

The name repeated around the room, fraying into reverent whispers. Little choruses that seemed to die out only to find new life echoing in little nooks and crannies.

"He's dead," Vincent said, his voice like a gavel.

"No," Lucrecia wept, "Sephiroth, my Sephiroth."

The echoes cried with her, higher, lower, a chorus that built and built. Tifa skin crawled. The presence at her mind's edge withdrew.

"Sephiroth, Sephiroth, Sephiroth," the chamber echoed.

"Reunion," a voice said at her back.

Tifa ducked. A hand passed over her head. She spun and threw a booted foot out. The tall, empty-eyed clone stumbled back. His blond hair had turned silver in the night.

"Seph… iroth," he called, his voice gravelly. The echoes picked back up, new voices joining the chorus.

Hunched figures in black capes loped in through the entrance.

The tall clone lunged for her.

Lucrecia wailed. "My son, I'm so sorry."

The crack of Vincent's gun joined the echo, as did Zack's battlecry. She'd never seen them attack before, hadn't thought they could.

She ducked and dodged as the clone grabbed at her. She flipped back, her boot catching under the chin. He stumbled back up, his head lolling around and blood streaming from his mouth. They fought with no sense of self preservation, desperately reaching, grabbing, and tearing. One caught a fistful of Zack's hair and yanked it clean out.

There were dozens of them. Vincent was fighting off a transformation, but the least number of attackers. Tifa found herself backed into a corner, and saw Zack was the same on the other side of the chamber, torn between cutting them down and desperately protecting Cloud.

Red stained the floor of the crystal chamber. Lucrecia wept.

Tifa felt the glowing threads around her mind tighten, but no presence at her door. She fought viciously, kicking the clones back.

Lucrecia's wail cut off suddenly, and the glowing threads fell slack. She slumped in the crystal.

The threads tightened around Tifa's mind again, and Sephiroth's presence assailed the walls of her mind. The eyes of the clone in front of her turned green. He grew taller, stronger. She hissed and leapt forward, snapping his neck with a kick.

_'Behind you.'_

She swung around- to nothing.

The three behind her struck and she staggered forward, cursing. The threads in her mind drew tighter and tighter, strangling her. A clone threw her to the ground and raised a booted foot. She reached, grabbed up the threads and pulled.

The clones lurched. She leapt up, still pulling, and threw her fist into its throat. The little thread leading to it came loose and snapped into her before she could stop. The clone died in her hands. She knew what had happened, what it meant.

The presence in her mind hesitated. She didn't. The glowing threads made more sense to her all of a sudden, it wasn't just a connection, there were words in it, subharmonic orders to find Jenova's cells.

She screamed STOP down the line.

The remaining clones around the room stopped moving. Zack cut them down. Six little strings in her mind fell loose and wound back into her.

Vincent panted, his body straining against its own shape. He probably didn't realise what was happening to himself.

"Lucrecia?" he forced out.

The woman hung grey and empty in the crystal. She looked like she had been dead for decades, even her floating white clothes now moth eaten grave clothes.

"Sephiroth did this," Tifa said.

Vincent finished transforming into Galian beast. He howled in despair at the foot of the crystal. Tifa heard it for the vow for revenge that it was.

Zack looked around the blood splattered room, silver and black strewn over Mako crystals. He hung his head.

She left them to mourn and pull themselves back together.

Outside the sun had risen. It burned down on her without mercy. She washed the blood from her face and hands, and looked out across the water, her chin held high. She had taken advantage of both Zack and Vincent and compromised her own humanity, but that was a small price to pay for the planet's future. She was one step closer to defeating Sephiroth, and now she knew she could.

The presence in her head was brooding.

She thought back on that cheap shot he had taken during the fight.

 _'Stop invading my head_ ,' she threw out. Now that she could understand the mechanisms binding her own mind she was less threatened by his presence. He was still firmly on the outside, pulling on strings she could manipulate from the other end.

 _'You are the invader here_ ,' he replied. ' _This is neither your time, nor your place. It is mine by right.'_

She shrugged, and started to climb the nearby ridge to check the surroundings. ' _You've decided you're an alien. Nothing here is your right.'_

_'Then we are both strangers in a foreign land, and you have no grounds upon which to oppose me.'_

' _You burned my home. I have every reason.'_

 _'You burned my Mother,'_ he said, his voice low and furious.

She paused halfway up. Was that the difference, no Jenova specimen for him to draw from? She smiled and kept walking.

_'I hope it hurt.'_

_'You tell me.'_

Flames ignited in her veins. She gasped. Her insides burned, splintering her bones, melting the marrow, cutting her off from a thousand pinpoints of connection, her children screaming for her. A rush of panic bowled her over and she fell to her knees. She gritted her teeth and slammed her walls back up.

She wasn't on fire. She wasn't Jenova. She wasn't. The sensation retreated. She panted, blinking through spots in her vision.

_'You cannot deny what you have become, however unworthy you are of her legacy.'_

She clenched her jaw and pulled herself back up.

_'It doesn't matter. I'm not your puppet and I'm not attending your reunion.'_

_'Oh? Perhaps you wish to stand at my side instead. Abandon your quest and I will welcome you,'_ he offered, with a lie so bald faced she was insulted at it.

He laughed.

_'No, you won't.'_

_'No. I won't. Neither will humanity, and neither will Gaia,'_ his voice slithered through her. ' _This planet hates you as much as it does me.'_

She didn't know if it was true. She waited for the sting of self-doubt, the hesitation and regret, the hum of anxiety. It never came.

She reached the top of the ridge, snow and rock crunching under her boots. The mountains stretched out in every direction, rugged and towering.

She realised that she didn't care if the Planet hated her. She had once. She regretted that loss more than she did the Planet's disdain. Gaia had never much cared anyway. A freezing wind howled over the ridge and lifted her hair. Inside of her Sephiroth watched, silent and malicious.

She looked out across the land, reactor studded and dying.

 _'I'm not fighting because I love Gaia_.' She breathed deeply in the cold air. _'I'm fighting because I hate you.'_

She was a little ashamed of herself for it. But not very much.

Sephiroth felt amused.


End file.
